CANNES, France -- Only God Forgives: unforgettable? More like unforgivable. Back in 2011, Nicolas Winding Refn’s first outing with Hollywood hunk Ryan Gosling resulted in the suave, rapturous crime thriller Drive, which premiered here in Cannes and nabbed the Danish filmmaker the prize for Best Director. So expectations were not unreasonably high for this year’s hotly awaited competition entry Only God Forgives, their latest team effort about a revenge killing in the seedy Thai underworld, which played this morning to a breathless 8:30 a.m. audience. The result? Sensory shock and awe, followed by a narrative stupor, then capped with a heavy chorus of boos.

Kristin Scott Thomas. (Getty Images)

Those expecting another smoldering Steve McQueen impression from Mr. Gosling won’t recognize the inscrutable tabula rasa he plays here named Julian, a near-catatonic scion from a drug matriarchy headed by blood-thirsty drug trafficking villainess Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas, the film’s only shining light in a gleefully profane black widow role). The whisper of a plot concerns Mr. Gosling’s older brother Billy (Tom Burke), who is murdered after raping and killing a 16-year-old. (“I’m sure he had his reasons,” sighs Crystal.) Mommy wants retribution (ideally someone’s head on a plate), and Mr. Gosling does his bloody but emasculated best to oblige. The only hitch is having to face down demonic (or is he deific?) retired police chief Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), an angel of death who acts as judge, jury and executioner to all the city’s scum and revels in sword-swinging mayhem before serenading the local cops with a round of karaoke.

The eccentricities would be endearing—even profound—if the film didn’t work so hard to make its characters so opaque. Cliff Martinez’s ominous drones accompany lovingly composed tableaux vivants of the actors, frozen in stately repose or glaring with smoldering intensity while bathed in crimson light and framed against opulent wallpaper designs. But cool poses do not a movie make. (Although it could be the basis of a fantastic coffee table book.) On paper, the film is a cunning inversion of the hero/villain trope, where justice prevails even though one’s sympathies may veer towards the crooks. But Mr. Refn wants to eschew genre and meditate on the metaphysical. Problem is, those moments of contemplation are empty vessels without a developed sense of emotional conflict.

Mr. Gosling, tellingly, was nowhere in sight. Cannes topper Thierry Fremaux made a rare appearance at the press conference to hand-deliver a message of regret from the heartthrob, who hailed Mr. Refn and insisted on his pride in the film. “He was unable to catch a plane yesterday,” said Mr. Fremaux. Indeed.

No matter, anyway: the film’s greatest thrill is Ms. Thomas, whose monstrous mother is a deliciously welcome addition to her formidable gallery of sophisticated roles. “This kind of film is really not my thing,” said Ms. Thomas at the film’s press conference. “But what appealed to me was working with Nicolas.”

Mr. Refn laughed at his star’s ability to embody such rough stuff. “She had no problem turning on the bitch switch,” he said. And one of the film’s highlights is watching her call someone a “cum-dumpster” (a pejorative suggested, remarkably enough, by Mr. Gosling). “It took me about eight takes to pronounce that word,” said Ms. Thomas. “Can you do it now?” ribbed Mr. Refn. “No,” she replied, with an icy smile.

Robert Redford. (Getty Images)

Ms. Thomas has good thespian company here in Cannes: Robert Redford also offered up a brave, admirably physical performance today in the single-person adventure drama All Is Lost, the latest from J.C. Candor (Margin Call), which features the Sundance founder as lone voyager on a leaky yacht stuck 1700 miles away from civilization who must fight the elements as they slowly erode his hope of survival. With no other actors in sight, the septuagenarian actor is in almost every single frame; and while the man-against-nature spectacle doesn’t completely maintain its intensity, Mr. Redford himself is never less than engaging, endearing and frankly just plain engrossing. The Oscars just got put on notice.

Dennis Rodman, always on the rebound.

At Dennis Rodman’s 52nd birthday party at Cheetahs Gentlemen’s Club on Monday evening, the flamboyant former basketball star slunk from one designated VIP section to the next, protected by bouncers and surrounded by throngs of obsequious followers. (They don’t call him “The Worm” for nothing.)

One can’t blame Mr. Rodman—wearing a relatively tame ensemble of bellbottom jeans, an unbuttoned white linen shirt, a baseball cap and sunglasses—for wanting his privacy.

Since traveling to North Korea with Vice in February to meet Kim Jong-un (whom Mr. Rodman now considers a friend), he has become a kind of accidental ambassador, having played a pivotal role in what may go down as the weirdest political event of the 21st century.

“I wasn’t a Dennis Rodman fan until he went to North Korea and then asked for the release of Kenneth Bae,” said Cheetahs owner Sam Zherka, referring to the American citizen currently detained in North Korea, who was recently sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.

“Maybe he could accomplish what our government failed to accomplish.”

Basketball diplomacy, however, was not on Mr. Rodman’s mind on Monday. We managed to swing a couple of encounters with the NBA Hall of Famer, who understandably seemed more intent on having a good time than discussing politics, despite his plans to return to North Korea in August.

“How’s it goin’, brother?” Mr. Rodman asked the Transom upon his arrival. “Shit, I haven’t had a drink in three days. Time to get going.”

Mr. Rodman has been celebrating his birthday for about three weeks now. In early May, there was a Las Vegas pool party; next week, he’ll make a stop in Toronto to further fête his 52nd. New York, it turns out, was supposed to be the climax, according to Mr. Rodman’s agent, Steve Simon.

“He just wanted to have a kick-ass party,” said Mr. Simon. “He loves New York.”

One dancer, who called herself Sabina, told us that she had never seen Cheetahs more packed. And what did she think of Mr. Rodman, we wondered?

“What is he?” she asked, correcting herself: “Where is he?”

We weren’t exactly sure how to answer either question.

Another dancer, named Sandra, if we remember correctly, thought the party was great for the club. Of course—but what did she make of Mr. Rodman’s sketchy relationship with the 29-year-old dictator Kim Jong-un?

“Oh yeah … I heard about that,” she said noncommittally, rubbing our lower back. “So, do you want a dance?”

We declined, moving closer to the glass-enclosed VIP room in which Mr. Rodman had recently installed himself. Long after our first, ephemeral encounter with the man of the hour, we finally finagled our way inside to have another audience.

As it turned out, he wouldn’t speak with us. But he had just eaten a lot of sushi, and it seemed that he’d put back more than a few, so his guard was down. We took a moment to watch him.

“No fat here! No fat here!” Mr. Rodman proudly exclaimed to no one in particular, patting his bare, chiseled, tattooed belly.

His did not look like the body of a 52-year-old man.

CANNES, France -- Liberace fluttered into the Cannes Film Festival this morning and graced the masses with the heartfelt Behind the Candelabra, Steven Soderbergh’s directorial swan song and a touching May-December love story between Mr. Showmanship (Michael Douglas) and Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), his longtime arm-candy companion. (American audiences with a good cable package or their friend’s HBO-to-Go password can watch it this Sunday night.) Mr. Douglas is astonishing in a deeply committed, vanity-free performance as the effeminate, wildly successful and flamboyantly closeted piano player; and Mr. Damon brings true pathos to his role as Liberace’s unhappy boy toy. Delightfully outrageous while almost never feeling campy, with a beautiful script by Richard LaGravenese, Candelabra is the first true gay-marriage drama, an apt romance for the Obama Age where homosexuality, bedazzled as it may be in this outré ’70s-’80s period piece, is never presented as alien or perverse. (Probably the most scandalous part of this film is seeing how much Liberace loved to cook at home for Scott and sit on the couch cuddling over a bowl of popcorn.) This is a fractured fairy tale about two lonely souls, not a True Hollywood Story of immoral decline, and the result is all the more resonant.

Michael Douglas and Matt Damon. (Getty Images)

The press conference afterwards was aptly emotional (though still properly ribald), with Mr. Douglas clearly choking up about the chance to play this part. “It was right after my cancer, and this beautiful gift was handed to me,” he said after a pause to hold back tears. “And I'm eternally grateful to Steve and Matt and Richard for waiting for me."

The occasion was also a sentimental one for Mr. Soderbergh, who won the Palme d’Or here in Cannes in 1989 for his debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape. "At the end of the day, it's really about two people in a room,” he pointed out about Candelabra. “And that was what my first film was about." He even reminisced with longtime Cannes moderator Henri Behar, who had been in that same conference room with him more than two decades ago. “My hair was darker," Mr. Behar said. "And I had hair!" added Mr. Soderbergh.

Mr. Damon laughed with the press about his many scenes between the sheets with Mr. Douglas. “I now have things in common with Sharon Stone and Glenn Close and Demi Moore,” he said. “It's great. We can all go out and trade stories.” But the main focus of attention was Mr. Damon’s revealing performance—especially the Brazilian spray tan he had gotten for the part. "The world really needed to see this,” said Mr. Soderbergh, who deliberately exploited (with Mr. Damon’s encouragement) the Oscar winner’s derrière, skinny tan lines and all. “Tonight, we'll see it on the biggest screen ever, which is jarring,” laughed Mr. Damon. “This is something you can't unsee. It will be seared into your memory."

Another hit in Cannes, which premiered last night, is an equally delightful look at excess. You want spiritual decadence? Look no further than The Great Beauty. A major revelation and one of the great triumphs of the festival, Paolo Sorrentino’s deliriously louche take on existential despair in the sumptuous bosom of Rome is a 21^st century version of La Dolce Vita, a swirling ode to the Eternal City that will make art-house audiences swoon. At last night’s press screening, virtually the entire crowd, floored by the film, sat in stunned silence through the entirety of the placid end credits—an almost unheard-of occurrence at a festival that prides itself on stampedes from one screening to the next.

Ryan Gosling. (Getty Images)

The suave Italian actor Toni Servillo plays Mastroianni’s celluloid heir, a 65-year-old journalist named Jep Gambardella with an early-career literary novella under his belt and no accomplishments other than attending debauched bacchanales ever since. And as acquaintances, friends and lovers drop like flies, Jep wanders the corridors of Roman high society in search of an enduring connection that will moor him to the world. “Roots are important,” says a Mother Teresa doppelgänger who crosses paths with Jep, in a turn that’s simultaneously satiric and haunting—a tone that Sorrentino astonishingly maintains throughout the film with a self-assurance that makes his high-wire balancing act seem effortless. It’s a perfectly tailored suit of a film, made with the most supple material and cut with masterful lines.

Less than a week remains at the Cannes Film Festival, but major titles are still to unspool, including tomorrow morning’s world premiere of Only God Forgives, Ryan Gosling’s reteaming with his professional BBF, the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. Their last effort was the cool-as-ice crime caper Drive; this one is their martial-arts revenge flick. Harvey Weinstein unveiled a few minutes of footage on the Croisette last Friday that made jaws drop, including a quick snippet of Oscar-nominee Kristin Scott-Thomas as a domineering matriarch with a baroque potty mouth (“How many cocks can you entertain in that cute little cum dumpster of yours?” she meows at her son’s sexy date). Further transgressions await.

CANNES, France -- Diamonds, schmiamonds—all it takes to dazzle the luxe black-tie Cannes crowd are simple harmonies, acoustic guitars and a wayward tabby cat. Greenwich Village rocked the Riviera over the weekend, as Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1961-set folk drama Inside Llewyn Davis charmed festgoers with a beguilingly buoyant tale of a talented musician brilliantly versed in self-sabotage.

A vibrant Oscar Isaac stars as the put-upon titular troubadour, a former member of a defunct folk duo whose new solo album is making bupkis while he couch-surfs and plays small-potatoes gigs at the downtown Gaslight Café. And Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake play pleasantly toothless white-bread act Jean and Jim who give him shelter and even a chance to play on a sure-hit novelty tune (although Jean’s red-hot disgust for Llewyn belies a more complex emotional entanglement). From one encounter to the next, Llewyn keeps getting in his own way, trapped in an elliptical purgatory of bad luck, poor timing and just plain ill-fated decisions.

Oscar Isaac, left, and Justin Timberlake star in Joel and Ethan Coen's latest flick, Inside Llewyn Davis. (Getty Images)

Inside Llewyn Davis is infused with the filmmakers’ caustic sense of absurdist ennui, but what makes the movie really soar are the songs, folk classics and obscurities (plus one hokey original) supervised by longtime Coen collaborator T-Bone Burnett and performed live on film by the actors. Despite all the on-screen talent, though, Mr. Isaac is the real revelation, an actor with limited musical training whose heart-wrenching vocal prowess more than holds its own against pros like Mr. Timberlake. “We were screwed until we met Oscar,” admitted Ethan Coen during the press conference the day after its evening press screening. And Mr. Isaac clearly relished the role. “It’s a melancholic film,” he said. “But in between takes, I was smiling ear-to-ear.” Cannes now has a clear frontrunner for the Best Actor prize.

Journalists from all over the world greeted the cast and crew with open arms, as well as the obligatory questions about the film’s wayward feline star, a cat belonging to a sympathetic Columbia professor who escapes from Llewyn’s care. The pet is the film’s one contrivance, a somewhat forced conceit and easy laugh that adds a slight false note to all the otherwise tight thematic chords. “The movie doesn’t really have a plot,” conceded Joel Coen. “That actually concerned us at a certain point, which is why we threw the cat in.”

The international reporters at Cannes are famous for some left-of-center questions, and, as always, they did not disappoint—especially one whom the Coens themselves couldn’t have scripted any better. “We Germans are not known for our sense of humor,” said a Teutonic TV correspondent. “Somehow the humor left with the war and the Holocaust. What do you think? Jewish humor, does it exist? If so what does it consist of?” Nervous laughter followed, along with a long pause interrupted by Mr. Timberlake warning the room, “I smell a trap!”

But Joel Coen took it in stride, and volleyed with a typically droll response. “There’s nothing like a Holocaust to put a stake in a certain type of humor,” he replied.

CANNES, France -- Who needs movies? Within a 24-hour period, street gunfire and a hotel heist have kept the masses entertained here in Cannes. In the early hours of Friday morning, $1.4 million in Chopard jewelry was stolen from a Suite Novotel when company reps from the U.S. had their room safe ripped out of the wall and swiftly spirited away. And Friday afternoon, at a live beachside taping of French entertainment show Le Grand Journal guest-starring Tarantino muse (and double Oscar-winner) Christoph Waltz, a lunatic shot off two loud blanks and caused a panicked audience to stampede off the stage before the 42-year-old perp was wrestled to the ground by local police. (The French newspaper Nice-Matin later reported that the man was carrying a starter’s pistol, a switchblade and a plastic grenade.)

Bling Ring star Emma Watson denied involvement in the jewel heist. (Getty Images)

Luxury robberies are nothing new to the Côte d’Azur. Hitchcock immortalized the act in 1955’s To Catch a Thief; and as recently as 2009, crooks absconded with more than $21 million in jewels from the Cartier store here in town. Cannes has always been a magnet for petty crimes, too, with humble festivalgoers occasionally getting mugged or having their accommodations raided. A few years ago, a group of Danish reporters had their computers taken; and even the late great Roger Ebert got his laptop swiped one year. The timing for the Chopard incident couldn’t have been more uncanny, though, since the world premiere of Sofia Coppola’s luxe robber flick The Bling Ring happened just hours before the crime. “I’m innocent! I promise I had nothing to do with it!” laughed Emma Watson, the film’s star, when on Saturday the Hollywood Reporter cheekily asked if she was wearing some of the stolen rocks.

Violence is no stranger to Cannes, either. One angry attendee set off a bomb in the Palais in the 1970s; and ever since 9/11, the festival has enforced a strict code of examining bags and using metal-detector wands on every person entering the main venue, an enormous concrete convention center (affectionately known as “the Bunker”) which hosts scores of daily screenings scattered throughout dozens of theaters large and small. One vigilant bag-checker was so lugubriously thorough at the first 8:30 a.m. screening on the very first day that it caused a backlog of hundreds of audience members—and eventually forced the guards to throw up their arms and let in the uninspected crowd en masse.

Bulgari better watch their back: on Tuesday night, they are joining Twentieth Century Fox in presenting a 50^th anniversary screening of the Elizabeth Taylor blockbuster Cleopatra, with Jessica Chastain reportedly hosting the evening and wearing four different choice pieces from the storied jeweler. The reception that follows at the Bulgari rooftop will feature some of Taylor’s original jewels, as well. Let’s hope the film’s 192-minute running time will keep any sticky-fingered party crashers at bay.

CANNES, France -- Gloomy skies may be hanging over the south of France, but psychedelic philosophizing is lighting up the screens indoors. Ari Folman’s The Congress opened up the Director’s Fortnight section of Cannes last night with a loopy dose of future shock featuring Robin Wright as a washed-up variation of herself who sells her scanned body, plus a gallery of emotional expressions and all performance rights, to Tinseltown composite Miramount Studios. No need to suffer the scandal-prone peccadillos, erratic temperaments or drug-fueled habits of stars; after turning them into digital avatars, the studio can dictate movie roles, shape career decisions and exploit promotional duties without any pushback. The forever-young and totally automated celebrity will do its duty impeccably and in perpetuity. (TMZ should fear for its life.)

Director Ari Folman, second from left, poses with the cast of The Congress. (Getty Images)

The digital Faustian bargain (pitched by Ms. Wright’s aging agent, touchingly played by Harvey Keitel) becomes midnight-movie manna when, 20 years later, Ms. Wright goes to a studio-run resort where people snort a gas that turns everything they perceive into a drug-fueled, candy-coated Looney Tunes cartoon populated by famous figures from pop history. In the future, humans are simply hallucinating shape-shifters who idolize past icons and morph seamlessly from Michael Jackson to Frank Sinatra to Grace Jones. But the next logical step is even more morbid: the studio, which has now merged with a Big Pharma company, wants Ms. Wright to sell her chemical essence so that they can let the public literally digest her.

The stoner-quality pontificating, which gets more baroquely animated and increasingly paranoid as it goes along, offers up dystopic visions that deliver kaleidoscopic science fiction at its most extreme—imagine Betty Boop crossed with The Matrix. The film is loosely adapted from Stanislaw Lem’s communist-era satire The Futurological Congress and its vision of a world dictated by illusions that pacify the public, and its update to 21^st century anxiety about virtual reality is admirable. But there’s a thematic sprawl to the film that finally ends in emotional overreach and narrative obfuscation. You might need to be tripping balls to really feel like the ending has any sort of a satisfying climax.

Celebrated Chinese auteur Jia Zhengke is only slightly more down-to-earth in his ripped-from-the-headlines tabloid omnibus A Touch of Sin, a quartet of lurid stories taken from recent news events in China. A darkly poetic slant on everything from a recent high-speed train crash to the suicides at a Foxconn factory, with a few disgruntled employees that go postal thrown in for good measure, Mr. Jia’s latest takes the usually austere director into unfamiliar pulp territory that includes a shotgun rampage and a defiant pedicurist who gets deadly with a fruit knife after being bitch-slapped with a fistful of renminbi. The overt themes of economic oppression come through loud and clear, although the audience will probably feel pummeled rather than persuaded.

Asghar Farhadi, right, director of The Past. (Getty Images)

Sober-minded literalists who prefer their plots unsullied by sensationalistic extremes will look favorably on divorce drama The Past, from poet of martial discord Asghar Farhadi (whose Oscar-winning film A Separation was a devastating look at an Iranian couple at the end their marriage).  As with his previous film, this delicately calibrated story of husbands, wives and children all shell-shocked by emotional upheaval makes for a compelling study that slowly (if tauntingly) parcels out its plot revelations like grenades that cause irreparable collateral damage. The setting is now France, and the cast includes Oscar nominee Bérénice Bejo (The Artist), but the concerns and emotional conflicts are clearly universal. It’s good to know filmmakers here can show devastated lives without always causing literal devastation.

Michael Musto (Photo: Patrick McMullan)

We knew this day would come. The Village Voice has made good on its threats and fired three longtime writers: nightlife columnist Michael Musto, theater critic Michael Feingold and food critic Robert Sietsema. Last week, which was particularly devastating for New York media, two top Village Voice editors--Will Bourne and Jessica Lustig--resigned rather than lay off five writers, as management had instructed. 

Unfortunately, it seems that those resignations were in vain.

We hear that the three beloved writers, who represented the last gasp of what was once a downtown institution, are being unceremoniously shown the door. According to a tipster, management is trying to let go of Mr. Sietsema, Mr. Feingold and Mr. Musto (who has been at the Voice for 30 years) without any severance package.

As Mr. Musto told Gawker, who first reported the layoffs: "So many people have come out to offer their love (and opportunities). I'll update you on all my new beginnings. My brand will be feistier than ever."

Honor Thy Thug is the sixth title in Ms. Clark’s “thug” series. In the book, released on April 23, Trae and Tasha Macklin are back as urban street lit’s first couple. Trae’s made a dangerous decision to do business with a seedy Chinese mob family, and the connection threatens to shake the core of Trae and Tasha’s relationship.

“A lot of women don’t want the straitlaced, clean-cut good guy,” Ms. Clark said. “They seem to want a bad boy.”

If authors of the genre have the distinction of being real-life players in the world they describe, Ms. Clark—thrice a New York Times best-selling author—has more than lived up to her title as the queen of street lit. She was so enamored with Al Dickens, author of the underground classic Uncle Yah Yah 21st Century Man of Wisdom, that she eventually married him after meeting him at Rahway State Prison (now East Jersey State Prison).

But Ms. Clark actually went one step better. Or worse. She switched places with her husband. She was released from prison in 2007 after serving nine and a half years for mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering. She’d been the ringleader of an illegal scheme that solicited thousands of dollars from consumers to put into a pot and then paid out to different “winners” at different times. She wrote her fiction longhand on yellow legal pads, the pages of which circulated through the jail compound at Federal Prison Camp in Alderson, W.Va., with prisoners reading one page at a time then passing it on. It was there that Ms. Clark served time with a wealthy mogul named Martha Stewart, who served as an inspiration and an occasional business adviser. “She did her little five months like a trouper and was always willing to help you out if she could,” Ms. Clark told the Urban Book Source in 2007.

While Ms. Clark was incarcerated, she sent her first manuscript, Thugs and the Women Who Love Them, to Carl Weber of Black Print Publishing in Brooklyn. Weeks later, she received a letter saying that her manuscript was accepted.

The genre, with its allegiance to all-or-nothing street politics and a firebrand code of ethics, was initially fostered by a cadre of authors like Ms. Clark who had actually lived the lives they narrated on the page.

Now that street lit seems poised to jump from the ghetto into the mainstream, it’s an open question whether that authenticity can survive. A major record label has snapped up several of the most popular authors, including Ms. Clark. Reality stars are co-authoring books.

Suddenly, a genre that built its cachet in the hearts and minds of voracious readers is wondering if it’s losing its soul.

And then there are academics like the writer Nick Chiles, who struggle with the notion that street lit is recognized as belonging to the proud, up-you-mighty-race tradition of the African-American literary canon. “Is street fiction some passing fad, or does it represent our future?” Mr. Chiles asked in The New York Times in 2006. “It’s depressing,” he continued, “that this noble profession, one that I aspired to as a child from the moment I first cracked open James Baldwin and Gabriel García Márquez about 30 years ago, has been reduced by the greed of the publishing industry and the ways of the American marketplace to a tasteless collection of pornography.”

Ms. Clark believes Mr. Chiles and others are entitled to their opinion, but her devotion to narrative device and character development and her loyalty to her readers is non-negotiable.

“My male and female characters are very strong,” Ms. Clark said. “The males and the females are college-educated, but they just went down the wrong path and ended up a thug. But they love hard. They’re providers. They’re sexy. They’re fine. The women like that. They identify with that. And if they don’t have a brother like the brothers in my books, they say, ‘I want one just like it.’ And the brothers, too.”

Ms. Clark, who stands about 5-foot-5, with expressive features that betray any leftover desire to mask her delight, boredom or opinion of the absurd, tells a story about one of her encounters with Tony F. Mack, the embattled mayor of Trenton, N.J.

“He was coming through at this festival when I did a book signing,” she said, her eyes lighting up. “So one of his bodyguards, when they walked past my table, he stopped. And he said to the mayor, ‘Man, when I read her books, it be on between me and my wife!’ And I’m, like, oh my God, I know he just didn’t say that to the mayor!”

Keenan Norris, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Riverside says that the tropes and rhetorical signposts of hip-hop were born out of the street lit of the 1960s and ’70s, especially Robert “Iceberg Slim” Beck’s groundbreaking novel Pimp.

“The art forms are elementally joined,” said Mr. Norris, whose novel Brother and the Dancer is the 2012 James D. Houston Award winner.

In fact, Mr. Norris originally wished to give Street Lit: Popularity, Controversy & Analysis, an anthology he is editing, the title “The Takeover,” a reference to a 2001 Jay-Z song. The would-be title didn’t survive, but it underlined the central question that authors, publishers and black intellectuals can’t seem to agree on: has street lit taken over the $300 million black literature market?

Ms. Clark is signed to Cash Money Content, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. It’s run by the record label Cash Money, home to rappers Drake and Lil Wayne. Cash Money was co-founded by Bryan “Birdman” Williams. “I think we should read more as a people,” Mr. Williams writes on Cash Money Content’s site. “And me, personally, I feel like I should read more. We have so much influence on the music world, I just wanted to convert it to books. Just to get us to read more.”

There is a lot of reading going on, as well as a lot of arguing. Mr. Norris says there are two competing viewpoints. “Black writers who have written on this topic, like Terri McMillan, Bernice McFadden, Nick Chiles and others, will tell you that it definitely has [taken over the black literature market.] On the other hand, if you talk to agents, many express some reservation about street lit’s staying power, that it’s just a fad, a passing trend.”

Over the years, several books have become legacy titles. The Agency Group’s Marc Gerald, the agent for Cash Money Content, says that Pimp has sold more than five million copies since its release in 1969. Mr. Beck’s work is widely regarded as the blueprint of the genre.

And a profitable genre it remains more than 40 years later. Teri Woods has written 20 novels and sold more than two million books worldwide. Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever (1999) has sold over a million copies worldwide. Ms. Clark herself has sold more than 450,000 books, according to the numbers she publishes on her website.

As street lit rides this wave of popularity into the digital age, quasi-celebrities like former New York hip-hop insider-turned-reality star Stevie J, NeNe Leakes and Phaedra Parks are getting deals to put their names on books. And business is good. But publishing industry insiders and authors alike are frustrated with these deals that help keep the industry afloat.

“Get your money, ma, do it however you need to do it, but don’t say you’re a writer, ’cause you’re not,” said the street lit author K’wan Foye. “We’re the ones up at night until the sun comes up. We’re writing and putting it all out there.”

At the agency, other than Mr. Wu, Mr. Foye was the only picture of hip-hop: baggy jeans, baggy sweater and a leather jacket. Mr. Foye, the son of a painter and a poet whose lives were wrecked by the drug epidemic in Harlem in the ’80s, says that his novels Gangsta and Road Dawgz are legacy titles born out of his personal experience. “I wasn’t even doing it for money,” said Mr. Foye, who parked his Mercedes E320 and joined The Observer at the long table inside the agency’s boardroom in Harlem. “I just bled on the pages.”

His mother was an aspiring author who died of cancer before she realized her dream.

“She never got a chance to do it. That’s why it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. If you’re playing with it, don’t sit next to me, don’t talk to me. We don’t have anything in common.”

Ms. Clark doesn’t believe her gift was all that special. She simply wanted it.

“It comes out in the writing,” Ms. Clark offered when asked about whether the street lit genre is here to stay. “I hear a lot of writers, and people say, ‘Well, you have to know about [street life to write about it].’ That’s not necessarily true. If you can imagine it, you can write it. The finished product tells it all.”

Ms. Clark still handwrites her novels, and she holes up in a hotel room when on deadline. “Anybody can do it,” she said.

editorial@observer.com

Inside an AC&C Manhattan shelter, November 13, 2010. (Photo: Jeff Latzer)

At an animal rights debate last week, five mayoral hopefuls voiced their support for a change in city oversight of animal shelters.

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio set his sights on Animal Care and Control of New York City, the organization that runs the city’s shelters. “AC&C has been a mess,” Mr. de Blasio said. “It’s been unfair to animals and unfair to everyone who cares about animals.”

According to volunteers, Mr. de Blasio’s comment is right on the mark.

“A dog will have a Post-it note on its kennel card saying ‘move to isolation ward’ and it’ll be there for five days and they’ll put a new arrival right next to it,” said one volunteer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “There is no disease management or infection control.”

Jeff Latzer, an ex-volunteer, agreed. “If you really want to quarantine your animals,” Mr. Latzer said, “you need to have a separate HVAC air system going into the quarantine system, and a separate one for adoption, and a third one for incoming animals. When it’s all combined you have this stale air, which becomes a petri dish for disease and infections.”

Mr. Latzer is one of a group of ex-volunteers whose experiences helped inform a report, put out early this year by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, which raised questions about AC&C shelter facilities.

Mr. Stringer’s report portrayed a chronically underfunded and overcrowded shelter system in which employee negligence and unsanitary conditions lead to an infection rate of nearly 100 percent for animals after intake.

AC&C spokesperson Richard Gentles, however, disputed critics’ characterizations of sanitary conditions.

“AC&C has cleaning policies, procedures and protocols in place to help limit the spread of infectious illnesses in the care centers,” Mr. Gentles said via email, explaining that all kennels are thoroughly broken down and cleaned at least once a day.

“Volunteers,” he added, “play a vital role in the operation of our shelter system, and we are very grateful for their support and hard work.”

A squalid shelter cage, May 21, 2011. (Photo: Jeff Latzer)

According to those who have spent time volunteering, though, few people show up on a regular basis to help out. Whether it’s the stress of spending time at a shelter where animals face the threat of euthanasia or the burden of working in an environment where, some say, basic needs of animals are often neglected, turnover is high.

Mr. Latzer said that volunteers find different ways to try and make animals’ lives better in the shelter environment. For some, this means buying extra toys and healthier food. Others help out by obtaining euthanasia lists—released every night—and anonymously asking animal rescue organizations to save the animals before it’s too late.

But it is slow going, and some have moved to advocate for systemic change.

Esther Koslow, a former AC&C volunteer, serves on the board of the Shelter Reform Action Committee, a coalition of animal rights advocates devoted to reforming the city-funded shelters.

The SRAC advocates for a divorce of the animal shelter system — which operates shelters in Harlem, Brooklyn and Staten Island under a five-year, $36 million contract— from the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

The committee argues that the department is much more concerned about animal control than animal care, resulting in poor funding to AC&C—which has not had a full-time medical director since 2010, according to Mr. Stringer’s recent report.

“If you look at the Department of Health mandate,” Ms. Koslow said, “the only mention of animals is to protect people from animals and animal diseases.”

Ms. Koslow and other ex-volunteer advocates favor a conservancy model for the shelter system, which would allow for an independent and expanded board of directors with more animal care expertise and fundraising prowess.

Unsanitary conditions, November 20, 2010. (Photo: Jeff Latzer)

AC&C, for its part, has begun to make some changes on the heels of Mr. Stringer’s report. The agency is hiring new staff for several positions and creating a separate department devoted to adoptions. It’s also slated to receive a total of $10 million in additional funding from the city by next year, which it will use to add more shelter staff and expand some existing services.

But volunteers-turned-reformers say they’re skeptical much is changing.

“The AC&C has been in operation since January 1, 1995,” Ms. Koslow said, “and they just decided, oddly enough after the Stringer report came out, that, ‘Gee, you know what, we should have an adoptions staff.’”

Ms. Koslow and Mr. Latzer both said they will fight to change the system from the outside, whether it’s by testifying at City Council hearings or spreading the word to the public in New York and beyond through social media.

The city, they added, contains enough compassion for animal welfare, as well as the resources and energy to make reform a reality—if only New Yorkers knew what was going on right under their noses.

This story was produced by The New York World.

I parked and checked my phone. My producers had assured me we wouldn’t hear till Sunday if the pilot I wrote, The Ordained, would be picked up by CBS for series. Then I saw a smattering of messages from friends.

“Such a bummer about your show.” “Does this mean what I think it means?” “Sorry, so sorry.”

My network had announced its fall lineup, and we weren’t on it.

I called one of my producers. He’d just heard too. But he’d also heard it wasn’t over. CBS had picked up only two dramas so far, and word was they’d choose another.

I trudged through the upscale commuter town to the bookstore. My college pal Gerry had come for support. The clerk led us to the basement event space, where rows of folding chairs stood. They were empty.

I went back upstairs and sat at a table next to the door with a stack of books and a plate of cookies. A few families wandered in to kill time in the children’s section. Their kids ate my cookies. I sold one book. To my friend Gerry.

“Maybe it wasn’t the right…demographic?” said the clerk, as I left. We looked at the cover of my novel, which has a Bible on it, its pages folded in the shape of a heart. It’s soapy women’s fiction set in a Southern evangelical megachurch. He felt terrible. I felt worse.

Saturday came and went. We heard nothing. Misery.

Then, Sunday. It’s hard to be anxious on Mother’s Day, amid the flowers and the home-made cards and little-girl hugs. But I managed.

I stayed off the industry gossip sites, same as usual, though I see now they were rife with speculation. My producers clung to their cautious optimism. We were still in the conversation! We still had a shot!

It was my husband who Googled for news exactly two minutes after the news broke: the network had picked up a legal drama…that wasn’t ours.

If you’re a writer, you know this feeling. When the manuscript you slaved over for years is rejected by the dozenth publisher. When the magazine that commissioned your cover story mails you a kill fee. When a facsimile of the screenplay you sold to a studio gets made by someone else. It’s a sucker punch.

And because we’re writers, it feels intensely personal. On our best days we feel like we might actually be kind of okay at what we do. On our worst, we are exposed as frauds.

I know what you’re going to say, and I thank you in advance. That it’s amazing I got this far. That it’s unheard of for a thumb-sucking novice like me to get a beginner script produced as a network pilot. I hear you. I hear the high risk, high reward. I hear the better luck next time. (Also, it’s not completely and totally over; there’s talk of cable.)

And someday soon, I will return your calls and we’ll have that long-overdue lunch, over which I will regale you with the gory details.

But for now I am crawling into the darkest corner of my house and just rocking.

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen is the author of Pastors’ Wives, a new novel from Penguin/Plume, and The Ordained, a 2013 CBS drama pilot. Previously, she was a staff writer for Time magazine. Readers can friend her on Facebook, follow her on Twitter @lisacullen, or visit her website at www.lisacullen.com.